On 10 Mar 2021 01:06:32 GMT
Marland wrote:
Its not the only strange problem I have had with news tap ,last year when
reading or it may have been replying to one of the regulars the thing
closed down entirely .

You mean it crashed? iOS and Android make crashes look like an ordered
shutdown unlike in desktop OSs when you get a message box or command line
error.

wrote:
On 10 Mar 2021 01:06:32 GMT
Marland wrote:
Its not the only strange problem I have had with news tap ,last year when
reading or it may have been replying to one of the regulars the thing
closed down entirely .

You mean it crashed? iOS and Android make crashes look like an ordered
shutdown unlike in desktop OSs when you get a message box or command line
error.



I find NewsTap crashes quite often while downloading messages. As you say,
no messages, it just shuts down. Â*Just launch it again, and it's back to
normal, except that, very often, read messages become 'unread' again.

On Wed, 10 Mar 2021 08:44:44 -0000 (UTC)
Recliner wrote:
wrote:
On 10 Mar 2021 01:06:32 GMT
Marland wrote:
Its not the only strange problem I have had with news tap ,last year when
reading or it may have been replying to one of the regulars the thing
closed down entirely .

You mean it crashed? iOS and Android make crashes look like an ordered
shutdown unlike in desktop OSs when you get a message box or command line
error.



I find NewsTap crashes quite often while downloading messages. As you say,

Sounds like a work in progress rather than a finished product.

wrote:
On Wed, 10 Mar 2021 08:44:44 -0000 (UTC)
Recliner wrote:
wrote:
On 10 Mar 2021 01:06:32 GMT
Marland wrote:
Its not the only strange problem I have had with news tap ,last year when
reading or it may have been replying to one of the regulars the thing
closed down entirely .

You mean it crashed? iOS and Android make crashes look like an ordered
shutdown unlike in desktop OSs when you get a message box or command line
error.



I find NewsTap crashes quite often while downloading messages. As you say,

Sounds like a work in progress rather than a finished product.



Like many apps, it's a part-time one-man product. I suspect that as usenet
fades away, so do the number of potential users, so he doesn't sell many
new copies (and gets no revenue from existing users). But at least the
bug(s) don't seem to be anything to do with your code.

He says:

"If a group has a single thread which reaches a certain depth, then the
whole group and all its threads are affected. NewsTap always stores the
tree structure of a whole group in a file, and so when iOS fails to read
this file because of a single deep thread, then the thread information for
the whole group is missing.

Most groups do not have such deep threads, so most of the time this iOS bug
remains invisible. The groups which I read usually do not have such deep
threads nowadays, therefore I’m not sure when this started."


Anyway, he's on the case, and has submitted a bug report to Apple, and is
also trying to creating a workaround to the iOS bug, on the assumption that
a fix won't come quickly:

"Therefore I guess this issue must be relatively new, but you might be
right and this was already a bug in iOS 13 (which was very buggy in the
first place) and is not yet fixed. Nevertheless, I’ve sent a bug report to
Apple, so hopefully Apple will fix this some day. And because Apple is lazy
in fixing bugs which are not getting public interest (list security bugs),
I’m also writing a replacement for the buggy iOS call, so I can work around
this iOS bug. Unfortunately Apple has not documented the file format
(IMHO), so this might need a short while to test everything..."

In message , at 10:03:36 on Wed, 10 Mar
2021, Recliner remarked:
wrote:
On Wed, 10 Mar 2021 08:44:44 -0000 (UTC)
Recliner wrote:
wrote:
On 10 Mar 2021 01:06:32 GMT
Marland wrote:
Its not the only strange problem I have had with news tap ,last
year when
reading or it may have been replying to one of the regulars the thing
closed down entirely .

You mean it crashed? iOS and Android make crashes look like an ordered
shutdown unlike in desktop OSs when you get a message box or command line
error.



I find NewsTap crashes quite often while downloading messages. As you say,

Sounds like a work in progress rather than a finished product.



Like many apps, it's a part-time one-man product. I suspect that as usenet
fades away, so do the number of potential users, so he doesn't sell many
new copies (and gets no revenue from existing users). But at least the
bug(s) don't seem to be anything to do with your code.

He says:

"If a group has a single thread which reaches a certain depth, then the
whole group and all its threads are affected. NewsTap always stores the
tree structure of a whole group in a file, and so when iOS fails to read
this file because of a single deep thread, then the thread information for
the whole group is missing.

Most groups do not have such deep threads, so most of the time this iOS bug
remains invisible. The groups which I read usually do not have such deep
threads nowadays, therefore I’m not sure when this started."


Anyway, he's on the case, and has submitted a bug report to Apple, and is
also trying to creating a workaround to the iOS bug, on the assumption that
a fix won't come quickly:

"Therefore I guess this issue must be relatively new, but you might be
right and this was already a bug in iOS 13 (which was very buggy in the
first place) and is not yet fixed. Nevertheless, I’ve sent a bug report to
Apple, so hopefully Apple will fix this some day. And because Apple is lazy
in fixing bugs which are not getting public interest (list security bugs),
I’m also writing a replacement for the buggy iOS call, so I can work around
this iOS bug. Unfortunately Apple has not documented the file format
(IMHO), so this might need a short while to test everything..."

I wonder if (a bit like the infamous Covid test results being stored in
an Excel spreadsheet) a quick fix would be to write that data in two
files, and glue it back together after they've been read back in.
--
Roland Perry

On Wed, 10 Mar 2021 11:53:02 +0000, Roland Perry wrote:

In message , at 10:03:36 on Wed, 10 Mar
2021, Recliner remarked:
wrote:
On Wed, 10 Mar 2021 08:44:44 -0000 (UTC)
Recliner wrote:
wrote:
On 10 Mar 2021 01:06:32 GMT
Marland wrote:
Its not the only strange problem I have had with news tap ,last
year when
reading or it may have been replying to one of the regulars the thing
closed down entirely .

You mean it crashed? iOS and Android make crashes look like an ordered
shutdown unlike in desktop OSs when you get a message box or command line
error.



I find NewsTap crashes quite often while downloading messages. As you say,

Sounds like a work in progress rather than a finished product.



Like many apps, it's a part-time one-man product. I suspect that as usenet
fades away, so do the number of potential users, so he doesn't sell many
new copies (and gets no revenue from existing users). But at least the
bug(s) don't seem to be anything to do with your code.

He says:

"If a group has a single thread which reaches a certain depth, then the
whole group and all its threads are affected. NewsTap always stores the
tree structure of a whole group in a file, and so when iOS fails to read
this file because of a single deep thread, then the thread information for
the whole group is missing.

Most groups do not have such deep threads, so most of the time this iOS bug
remains invisible. The groups which I read usually do not have such deep
threads nowadays, therefore I’m not sure when this started."


Anyway, he's on the case, and has submitted a bug report to Apple, and is
also trying to creating a workaround to the iOS bug, on the assumption that
a fix won't come quickly:

"Therefore I guess this issue must be relatively new, but you might be
right and this was already a bug in iOS 13 (which was very buggy in the
first place) and is not yet fixed. Nevertheless, I’ve sent a bug report to
Apple, so hopefully Apple will fix this some day. And because Apple is lazy
in fixing bugs which are not getting public interest (list security bugs),
I’m also writing a replacement for the buggy iOS call, so I can work around
this iOS bug. Unfortunately Apple has not documented the file format
(IMHO), so this might need a short while to test everything..."

I wonder if (a bit like the infamous Covid test results being stored in
an Excel spreadsheet) a quick fix would be to write that data in two
files, and glue it back together after they've been read back in.

Yes, that's one possible workaround, but if going down that route, you would write n small linked files, not two
medium-sized files. It's how large binary attachments are handled in newsgroups. Anyway, he seems to have a tidier
work-around proposal — let's see if it works.

On Wed, 10 Mar 2021 13:08:02 +0000
Recliner wrote:
On Wed, 10 Mar 2021 11:53:02 +0000, Roland Perry wrote:
Anyway, he's on the case, and has submitted a bug report to Apple, and is
also trying to creating a workaround to the iOS bug, on the assumption that
a fix won't come quickly:

"Therefore I guess this issue must be relatively new, but you might be
right and this was already a bug in iOS 13 (which was very buggy in the
first place) and is not yet fixed. Nevertheless, I’ve sent a bug report to
Apple, so hopefully Apple will fix this some day. And because Apple is lazy
in fixing bugs which are not getting public interest (list security bugs),
I’m also writing a replacement for the buggy iOS call, so I can work around
this iOS bug. Unfortunately Apple has not documented the file format
(IMHO), so this might need a short while to test everything..."

I wonder if (a bit like the infamous Covid test results being stored in
an Excel spreadsheet) a quick fix would be to write that data in two
files, and glue it back together after they've been read back in.

Yes, that's one possible workaround, but if going down that route, you would
write n small linked files, not two
medium-sized files. It's how large binary attachments are handled in
newsgroups. Anyway, he seems to have a tidier
work-around proposal — let's see if it works.

I'm struggling to imagine how something as fundamental as writing files could
have a bug in it which hasn't been noticed before.

wrote:
On Wed, 10 Mar 2021 13:08:02 +0000
Recliner wrote:
On Wed, 10 Mar 2021 11:53:02 +0000, Roland Perry wrote:
Anyway, he's on the case, and has submitted a bug report to Apple, and is
also trying to creating a workaround to the iOS bug, on the assumption that
a fix won't come quickly:

"Therefore I guess this issue must be relatively new, but you might be
right and this was already a bug in iOS 13 (which was very buggy in the
first place) and is not yet fixed. Nevertheless, I’ve sent a bug report to
Apple, so hopefully Apple will fix this some day. And because Apple is lazy
in fixing bugs which are not getting public interest (list security bugs),
I’m also writing a replacement for the buggy iOS call, so I can work around
this iOS bug. Unfortunately Apple has not documented the file format
(IMHO), so this might need a short while to test everything..."

I wonder if (a bit like the infamous Covid test results being stored in
an Excel spreadsheet) a quick fix would be to write that data in two
files, and glue it back together after they've been read back in.

Yes, that's one possible workaround, but if going down that route, you would
write n small linked files, not two
medium-sized files. It's how large binary attachments are handled in
newsgroups. Anyway, he seems to have a tidier
work-around proposal — let's see if it works.

I'm struggling to imagine how something as fundamental as writing files could
have a bug in it which hasn't been noticed before.



This is how he described the problem:

The problem seems to be that the system call that is used to load the
thread structure of a group from the file system is unable to do this, even
though the iOS system call to save this structure to the file system has
done so without any issue. The problem seems to happen only for extremely
deep nested threads. When saving these deeply nested structures iOS reports
no error, but when reading them, iOS reports an error.

On Wed, 10 Mar 2021 15:12:39 -0000 (UTC)
Recliner wrote:
wrote:
I'm struggling to imagine how something as fundamental as writing files could

have a bug in it which hasn't been noticed before.



This is how he described the problem:

The problem seems to be that the system call that is used to load the
thread structure of a group from the file system is unable to do this, even
though the iOS system call to save this structure to the file system has
done so without any issue. The problem seems to happen only for extremely
deep nested threads. When saving these deeply nested structures iOS reports
no error, but when reading them, iOS reports an error.

Oh well. Must be using some built in iOS data serialisation API. Should have
just written a normal file using json or some similar standard format but
20/20 hindsight etc.

In message , at 15:12:39 on Wed, 10 Mar
2021, Recliner remarked:
wrote:
On Wed, 10 Mar 2021 13:08:02 +0000
Recliner wrote:
On Wed, 10 Mar 2021 11:53:02 +0000, Roland Perry wrote:
Anyway, he's on the case, and has submitted a bug report to Apple, and is
also trying to creating a workaround to the iOS bug, on the
assumption that
a fix won't come quickly:

"Therefore I guess this issue must be relatively new, but you might be
right and this was already a bug in iOS 13 (which was very buggy in the
first place) and is not yet fixed. Nevertheless, I’ve sent a bug
report to
Apple, so hopefully Apple will fix this some day. And because
Apple is lazy
in fixing bugs which are not getting public interest (list security bugs),
I’m also writing a replacement for the buggy iOS call, so I can
work around
this iOS bug. Unfortunately Apple has not documented the file format
(IMHO), so this might need a short while to test everything..."

I wonder if (a bit like the infamous Covid test results being stored in
an Excel spreadsheet) a quick fix would be to write that data in two
files, and glue it back together after they've been read back in.

Yes, that's one possible workaround, but if going down that route, you would
write n small linked files, not two
medium-sized files. It's how large binary attachments are handled in
newsgroups. Anyway, he seems to have a tidier
work-around proposal — let's see if it works.

I'm struggling to imagine how something as fundamental as writing files could
have a bug in it which hasn't been noticed before.

This is how he described the problem:

The problem seems to be that the system call that is used to load the
thread structure of a group from the file system is unable to do this, even
though the iOS system call to save this structure to the file system has
done so without any issue. The problem seems to happen only for extremely
deep nested threads. When saving these deeply nested structures iOS reports
no error, but when reading them, iOS reports an error.

Is it a generic file read/write system call, or a very specialised one
that's been provided for the purpose of managing threaded data?
--
Roland Perry